Thursday, 10 August 2017

The usual story from the likes of London College of Fashion, Monsoon, Ethical Fashion Forum, or this time New Look. Kate Hills, who wote the blog post, has used the same tactic against me when I try to wrestle free information about UK T shirt manufactuers from her...

As Kate Hills says, if you look hard enough in the UK for a factory which will employ people under the minimum wage, you will probably find one. If you pay enough for a UK factory to pay a minimum wage, or you increase the lead time and order size and you pay your bills on time you will find loads more which New Look claim not to have heard of.

Glad that not many of my loans turned-out like Bondora loans, with worse returns than Funding Circle a few years ago or early Zopa personal loans. Worse than Bitbond. I could be wrong, but my Bondora login screen writes my account as worth €4,160 except that I can't withdraw it. The amount I can withdraw is €0 (worth €4,160 in Bondora money). If I click "sell loans", a high figure for salable loans appears sometimes, and then with a few clicks corrects itself to zero, so I can't withdraw Bondora money and I can't sell Bondora money, and I can't eat it or live in it or anything else either.

While Bondora write €4,160 on the account, profit is minus €834 (suggesting 8% or 9% bondora returns with the Bondora portfolio manager). Meanwhile they are happy to take card payments and pay commission for referrals. I imagine that a lot of people borrow on their credit cards to lend, and for some reason, nobody has written articles about what a scam the whole thing has become after a promising start before the firm tried to expand very quickly into new lending markets like Spain and relied more and more on equity finance companies to buy them out.

I don't see ads from Bondora so I can't forward them to the UK advertising standards authority - they do a lot of web and PR stuff and those Trustpilot reviews you can get done, but I'm surprised that it isn't sombody's job in some country to get the claims changed or just stop Bondora taking-on new loans. There are loads of very good euro P2P lending sites that loose trust because of their neighbour.

If you would like to nominate Bondora and their equity finance backers (who don't invest in the loans themselves I think) for the Fintech awards, please add a note saying "not seriously".